Pandemic Report
The latest weekly stats from CDC:
A minor shift up although from near a pandemic low base. I'ne seen anecdotal evidence of surges in Hawaii and the West Coast and near mrtro NYC. FLiRT variant KP.3 Is now the dominant new variant (see the above charts).
Relevant current news items include but are not restricted to:
- "The US Food and Drug Administration’s committee of independent advisers voted unanimously Wednesday to recommend that the agency tell vaccine manufacturers to update the Covid-19 shots so they will be more effective against the JN.1 lineage of the coronavirus." "On Friday, Moderna Inc. (NASDAQ:MRNA) announced that it has submitted an FDA application for review of its Spikevax 2024-2025 formula, which targets the SARS-CoV-2 variant JN.1."
- The government continues to prosecute COVID-19 relief fraud, including:
- a North Carolina family posed as landlords, looking for funds from NC HOPE, providing rent support during the economic collapse, and 2 members were sentenced to prison
- a SC man took out an EISL loan through SBA used for personal expenses amd has pled guilty
- 5 of 7 MN defendants were convicted of fraud involving needy children food relief funds
- an Illinois businessman was charged for testing kit Medicare fraud for allegedly shipping kits to dead people, for delivering unrequested kits and/or not delivering requested kits
- Trumpkin appeals court justices have restored the rights of CA school employees to sue to prevent future vaccine mandates
- A broad overview of evidence for or against government COVID-19 policies: "Claims that government responses made Covid-19 worse are not broadly true, and the same goes for claims that government responses were useless or ineffective. Claims that government responses help reduce the burden of Covid-19 are also not true. What is true is that there is no strong evidence to support claims about the impacts of the policies, one way or the other." Roughly, a 50/50 outcome.
- Dr. Fauci appeared at a Congressional hearing where he got scapegoated by Republican legislators on a number of issues regarding his alleged tie to social distancing and other policy guidelines, whether he used a personal email account to work around his official email account, the lab origin hypothesis, his role in government funding of controversial research in Wuhan. No real revelations here, exceot Fauci and family members faced death threats.
- A crackpot anti-vaxxer physician is arguing an IRS lawsuit of not paying taxes over 3 years was really retaliation because of her ideas like COVID vaccines made people magnetic.
- Another study debunks the anti-vaxxer claim that vaccinatiom is linked to premature births.
- Doctors are studying whether COVID may cause or contribute to the development of cancer. No short-term evidence yet.
- Some researchers suggest that excess mortality after the first year of the pandenic may in part reflect the vaccination regime, noting "side effects linked to the Covid vaccine have included ischaemic stroke, acute coronary syndrome and brain haemorrhage, cardiovascular diseases, coagulation, haemorrhages, gastrointestinal events and blood clotting".
Other Notes
The blog continues to attract a more normal readership flow; the long run trend has been somewhat over 2K/month, more recently it's been nearly half that rate, The current rate, if sustainable, is somewhere between those 2 trends. Twitter/X readership is somewhat improved, although I've had to restrict replies. To illustrate the point, I recently wrote a tweet proudly noting Dr. Pepper had displaced Pepsi as #2 soft drink. Apparently, I pissed off some Pepsi fans becausr there were 5 replies to 10 impressions which X refused to let me see claiming they were offensive. Dude, like it's about soft drinks, not politics.
As someone who has published nearly 7000 posts, something has changed in Blogger that seems to be browser related. For example, I make heavy use of hyperlinks, like in the bullet list aboce. My normal behavior is to highlight the text to link, click on hyperlink and copy/paste the link. Lately the end result is duplicating the selected text. Even things like selecting text to shade, change text color or hightlight/shade text weren't working anymore. While writing this post I discovered I could recover expected functionality using Firefox.
I don't usually blog about my "day job" since leaving academia in a recession, primarily being an Oracle database administrator. A lot of gigs I've done since 2009 has involved database audits. There ia a set of prominent security-related database criteria (roughly 138 to 200+) called STIGs that are generally expected, particularly for government databases. For example, a prominent requirement is that you run supported database software version that Oracle is proactively patching on an ongoing basis. Oracle generally releases quarterly "critical patch updates" It's almost impossible to succinctly summarize over 100 STIGs, but a number of them involve best practices for database operation, auditing database tramsactions, minimizing unused components, rotating complex password rotation (or better yet) multi-factor authentication, encryption of data at rest or in transit, and well-tested, flexible backups and recovery.
A lot of these things can become vey political (re: office politics) very quickly. To give a simple example, I administered some database appliances a few years back I had a website allowing a GUI overview of the system; there was some vulnerability for a built-in time server wbich corrected for server time drift. The government scans detected a related security flaw. The vendor was in a state of denial. Cyber escalated the issue and abruptly took the IP off the network. I read through the sparse document and thought I had found a way to shut down the time server through poor documentation, succeeded and a followup scan showed no violation. Weeks later, vendor support contacted me and said the issue they had denied was handled in their new software which would soon roll out to my consolidated patch.
But the example I wanted to address involved emcryption of Oracle's signatuture TCP port. The background is that Oracle had bundled native network encryption and TDE with its extra-cost Advanced Security Option. The port and relevant communication were not encrypted by default although Oracle made native network encryption available for enterprise-edition (the typical Oracle RDBMS license requirement). I've been to at least 2 federal sites where, despite years of STIGS amd signature elements documented in the STIG writeup, it was never implemented. I ran into political issues because they were runnung old Oracle client software which didn't support even the algoritms discussed in the STIG. I'll discuss the older scenario here.The civil service DBA was running on desupported 11G database software. Basically, he was getting error messages saying "The target server is requiring algorithms which our older software doesn't support." It could be easily fixed by installing 12C cliient software in a second Oracle Home and using that to connect. No, he demanded we should dummy down our algorithms to those his software client supported. His was the only feed out of like 32 to have this issue, and I wasn't about to violate STIGs because he refused to cooperate. He issued an internal grievance over the power-drunk comtractor, and I sicced Cyber on his incompetent ass
